Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I was going to ask for a source on this. But on checking in on a comment or two in this thread. This explains a lot of the consistently inconsistent behavior I’ve been seeing the few times I do check lemvotes. Like I was wondering who the hell was down voting Jo, as they are always pretty chill and even keeled. Look at any other comments on the thread no problem. I look up anyone from Lemmy.ml and it’s 404.
That’s certainly not the behavior of an instance with nothing to hide. Though I would still think administrators should be able to see the votes and identity brigading. But this does explain a few things I’ve noticed on isolated instances when I’ve used it.